


Mandatory therapy

by Amaritzi



Category: Mad Max Fury road, Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: F/M, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-07-03
Updated: 2016-07-03
Packaged: 2018-05-17 13:04:58
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 6,291
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5870740
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Amaritzi/pseuds/Amaritzi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Immortan Joe is finally taken out and the state makes the cult's survivors go to mandatory therapy at the Vuvalini Community Centre. </p><p>Everyone appreciates it except Toast and Slit.</p><p>An AU tale of the various things Toast comes to learn after their escape from Joe.<br/>One of which is that war boys may have their uses after all.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> There are so many beautiful Nuxable tales of cinnamony goodness, I wanted to play with an angry Toast/Slit determined not to do anything as smeg as falling in love.

\---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 

 

“You know if this was AA we’d be stuck with shit coffee and stale donuts right?”

 

The Dag sniggers at Toast and wraps her up in a squishy jasmine scented hug but Toast still feels like kicking things. 

She’s not actually sure if she can handle group therapy today. Maybe today she can suggest being allowed to beat up the war boys instead, a far more productive use of an afternoon... 

The Dag lets her go and grins like she knows exactly what she’s thinking: “Come Toasty…” dragging her over to the food table like a sulky kid. 

This time there are spiced pumpkin scones, fried green tomato fritters and some kind of smoked jalapeno tortilla thing that food bloggers would joygasm over. 

You can say what you want about the Vuvalini and their hippy gangsta ways, but those old crones can cook like mofo's.

 

The Vuvalini community centre is a series of sprawling wooden buildings on the edge of town past the industrial area where concrete and steel start giving way to bush.  
There is no signage leading to it and any outsiders looking for it are always getting lost. The council hates it but they’ve learnt over the years to leave the centre alone.  
They may not pay all their taxes, but they’re the only place willing to take in the town’s worst problem kids.  
Those who don’t fit into prison or foster homes. The ones that keep running away, or those that are so violent even the police are scared of them. 

And the weird ones, who everyone wants to just forget about. 

 

When they first got rescued from Joe’s cult, they had been placed in the Vuvalini centre for six months. 

The police were pretty damn quick to take credit for the bust – which in truth wouldn't have happened if it hadn't been for Furiosa, the only wife who’d ever escaped the cult, and Max, the lone traffic cop who’d helped her get to the right people in the force to finally and officially put everything in place for Joe’s arrest. 

Oh the police were very happy to storm in with sirens and helicopters and attack dogs, to lead Joe’s lieutenants into jail in handcuffs; reporters standing by like vultures; the police chief gleaming like a kid on Christmas morning. 

But no-one knew what to do with them afterwards. 

Joe’s sons, his imperators and the older warboys were pretty easy. After the whole, exhaustive trail, most of them were going to be in jail for life. The smaller kids who didn’t have parents could go into the foster system where the younger ones might actually stand a chance of getting adopted and living a normal life. 

But the others? 

The ‘milking mothers’ (who the fuck was buying Joe’s brand of bottled breast milk with silhouettes of women in suggestive poses on the label.... overseas fetish connoisseurs?), the 6 foot teenage delinquents who knew 45 different ways of killing, who could hijack a car in the blink of an eye, and the wives, those tragically beautiful tormented women who had been kept all locked up as Joe’s personal ‘breeders’. 

Oh no. Those ones they’d leave to the Vuvalini. 

 

It took three months for Toast and the other wives to feel vaguely ok with walking around the community centre. 

The Vuvalini had let them stay inside at first, feeding them an endless variety of vegetarian food and running healing workshops with them every day until they could recite the appropriate coping mechanisms for any number of panic attacks in their sleep. But knowing and doing are two different things. And in the end it was Valkyrie who dragged them out of there. Storming in one morning and refusing to listen to any of their complaints. 

“I have a fucking potato harvest coming in and we need you assholes. Do you realise you are the only ones in this camp who don’t have sore backs?  
Last night I couldn’t even unlace my fucking boots…” 

 

It was crude, but it worked. And their first experience of being in the outside world, amongst other people, the milking mothers transformed into normal women with their children by their sides, the war boys who'd evaded jail into sullen, hulking beasts of burden that the Vuvalini seemed determined to toungelash into viable members of society, and the wives, slowly and cautiously moving between them like wild birds that were easily startled. 

 

Of course if Angharad was still alive it would have been completely different.  
She’d always known what to do and how to do it. She was the invisible tendon that had kept them all together through all of the years of blood and pain and invasion while the wives who displeased Joe went missing and the organic leered like a troll.

 

Angharad was the one who lured Joe away from them when she could see he was in one of his bad moods. The one who walked like a queen despite her imprisonment. The one who whispered stories to them at night, who had helped Furiosa escape, who had offered her womb even though it wasn’t her turn, so that Cheedo could remain out of Joe’s bedroom for another 9 months. 

And it was Angharad had sacrificed herself during the police raid when Joe wanted to kill them all so they couldn’t testify against him.  
She’d taken his arm and sweeet talked him into escaping with her instead. 

And she’d died in a rain of bullets during the long shootout when Joe made his final stand in the workshops once he realised he was surrounded.  
The woman screaming to try and stop them; the police too full of excitement and testosterone to listen. 

And Max, afterward, holding the very pregnant, very dead Angharad in his arms and keening, a sound too terrible to be human, until Furiosa dragged him away. 

 

So despite their newfound freedom, it had taken a long time for the wives to feel like doing anything at all. 

Their first taste of freedom was a sunny field, dark black soil that stuck under their nails, golden potatoes with skin so fresh and new it seemed a pity to think of eating them. 

The warboys dug like the machines they had been trained to be, sweat dripping into their eyes, and the wives graded and packed potatoes with the milking mothers in the shade of the blue gums.  
Smell of potato, earth and eucalyptus swirling into something sweet and real. 

That night was the first night they slept without nightmares and when they woke the next morning their arms and shoulders ached like anything and they grinned at each other over their oatmeal because it was so damn good to be hurting that way instead of the hurting they were used to from Joe. 

\-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Now, more than a year later, Toast looks around the room. The sisters are all completely unrecognisable from the scantily clad waifs who Joe kept locked up as unwilling baby receptacles.

 

Cheedo has gone full Vuvalini and dresses like Valkyrie, biker leathers and Indian scarves. Feathers in her long dark hair.  
She’s staying with Val above her second hand shop and saving up money to get a bike of her own. 

The Dag has inherited most of Keep’s old clothes from when she was travelling Europe and now dresses like some kind of ethereal fairy in lace and silk and leather.  
She’s enrolled in a permaculture course and spends most of her day in the community garden which the Vuvalini run as an urban food programme in the centre of the town. 

Capable is completely, ridiculously, disgustingly in love with Nux, the big, blue-eyed warboy she met and fell in love with at the centre.  
She works at the library and Nux waits on the library steps to walk her home every evening after his shift at Furiosa’s garage which is staffed by ex-war boys who she keeps in line with her iron?titanium? fist. 

 

And Toast? Toast would like to study but her time as a wife has left her lacking in pretty much all of the qualifications she would need to get into even the most basic college course.  
She’s read hundreds of books but she doesn’t even have secondary schooling, and as much as she’d like to work in the library, she has absolutely no desire to smile and be nice to people – something Capable does in her sleep. 

So after a series of disastrous waitressing stints, Toast has ended up with a bar job that she’s pretty happy with.  
Lorca’s is a complete dive and she does all the shifts no-one else wants.  
The boring shifts let her read in peace behind the bar counter, and the strange, late-night boozer shifts give her a chance to study people from the safety of a solid mahogany fortress with a Glock tucked neatly beneath the cash register.

She reckons she’s figured out quite a lot: she’s found the cheapest laundry place in town and the best coffee shop; she’s on the 76th book of the 100 best Anarchist, communist and socialist books of all time, she’s pretty sure Furiosa and Max are an item despite their non-existent communication skills, and she knows that Nux is going to propose to Capable probably within the next year, probably on Valentine’s day, probably with a bunch of red roses or some shit. They'll definitely both cry.

Yup, they don’t call her Knowing for nothing… 

The one thing she doesn’t think she’ll ever understand is why it took the cops 25 years to give a shit and arrest Joe. 

\-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

As cult survivors they’re mandated to visit the centre on the first day of every month and Toast has taken to buying herself a new book from the second hand shop every second day of the month as a reward for getting through it. She’s come to hate group therapy even more than stocktake in the bar, which is a disgusting maze of torn receipts and papers stuck together with spilt booze, ketchup and cigarette ash because her boss, Angelo, thinks calculators and computers are the devil’s tools and that money should be left alone in a dark place so it can breed.

Toast eats her last fritter angrily, slurps down her coffee and smushes around her hair which is slowly growing out into some kind of punk/goth affair that she occasionally hacks at with scissors. 

Then she leans back in her chair to surreptitiously pinch the skin at her side in a deathgrip to keep from storming out of the room because as much as she fucking hates this shit, like big time hates it, she knows she has to be there for her sisters. 

 

Cheedo is talking about her fourth real date with a normal person. A willowy Shakesperean major with long blonde tresses and glasses who last Thursday took Cheedo to the park to read her sonnets. 

“I liked being there with her, but for like, three hours, I had no idea what she was saying. And we’re not really at the stage where I can explain why…”

The groups gives a collective sigh, and Capable leans forward to put her hand on Cheedo’s arm. 

“So you haven’t had THE TALK yet?”

 

Cheedo shakes her head sadly. 

“I’ve been trying to figure out when the right time is, cos I feel like I messed it up before, you know?”

 

“Cheedster, there’s no right time for THE TALK. And you don’t even have to tell anyone if you don’t want to. it's your business, no-one else's.  
This all depends on how safe you feel and what you feel like sharing…”

Keep looks at Cheedo with such sad understanding that Toast wonders what it is exactly that her TALK involves, and how many people she’d lost who couldn’t handle it. 

 

“You just gotta find the right person dude, like me ‘n Cape, everything is so easy with her….” 

And Nux proceeds to tell the group in increasing detail how many things he’s found ‘easy’ to do with Capable, while she goes more and more red. Embarrassed but also so obviously in love with the crazy fool that Toast feels like throwing up.  
Especially when Nux begins to talk about how easy it was for them to be ‘intimate’ and ‘make love’ despite their past.

Toast is 100% sure that if anyone asked if she wanted to make love she’d kick them straight in the crotch.

Nux begins to tell them the various ways that he likes to pleasure Capable in graphic detail until Val steps in to save them.  
Toast learns that it is capable for Capable to go as red as her hair, interesting...

Some of the milking mothers share how their TALK has gone with various new partners and friends and Cheedo listens shyly, squirming a little and Toast knows it’s because she feels like she should be writing things down to remember them.  
She’s so incredibly sweet and good that just looking at her makes Toast feel like some kind of hideous witch that would frighten cats and small children. 

The sisters managed to keep Cheedo out of Joe's bed, and to this day she has yet to even get past what Keep calls tomfoolery and Valkyrie calls rubbing. 

 

Toast reckons that the rest of them are pretty much fucked and that they really have no hope of ever being normal but the Vuvalini keep insisting on this deprogramming/recovery bullshit and she has to admit it has seemed to help a lot of them.  
Just not Toast. 

Who would rather be talking about ways to make sure that Joe’s boys stay in prison, ways to take out the dirty cops that turned a blind eye to all his deeds, the kind of stuff that Furiosa and Max are focusing on that she isn’t allowed to because she’s young and she's supposed to be learning how to be normal. 

At the end of the session they have to go around the group and each share something new they’ve realised.  
About themselves or about others; about being out in the world. 

And this is probably Toast's worst and best part of the session.  
It's bad because she has to think of something mundane to say instead of being truthful and therefore angry and therefore a 'failure' in the kind-hearted women's programe, and it's good because it is the only time that the person that hates group therapy more than Toast has to speak.

Slit's answers are always classic, and Toast is collecting them in her little red book of sayings. 

Nux’s best friend Slit is a hulking beast of a man with a Glasgow smile who only really started looking human when he started growing out his hair.  
He works with Furiosa and Toast usually sees him at the garage, covered in grease and talking shit to all the other mechanics, or in a pub with Nux, drunk and disorderly, playing pool.  
He’s usually covered in bruises and cuts and by reputation Slit loves fighting, he’s pretty good at it and he usually wins. 

Toast imagines him cruising the streets looking for trouble because he misses the warboy life.  
He’s probably still pissed that Joe got arrested before he could graduate up to Imperator status. 

She hasn’t quite worked out if his group therapy contributions are genuine or his own particular black humour. 

Last month: “I learnt that Nux likes to read recipe books when he’s on the crapper.”

The month before: “I learnt that brandy tastes better with gingerale”

Four months ago: “I learnt that Nux can mention Capable as many as 80 times in one day”

 

This week is a little different though. Maybe he’s bored or maybe he’s got nothing sarcastic enough to say but he turns a little to Cheedo, who is sitting a few milking mothers away from him. his voice, as usual, is low and scratchy, like he’s been out on the town the night before, like he has the sea in his throat:

“Shakespeare’s a sack of shit dude, you don’t have to pretend to like him”.

Cheedo’s surprised laugh hits Toast somewhere in her chest and she isn’t quite sure why, keeps trying to figure it out.  
The Dag looks across at her and winks.

They take the train home, whole car filled with fucked up cult survivors. Some milking mothers start singing at the back, old style blues, songs they must have known before they got took. 

"Sun's going down Toasty, this is the fox's time, look at the shadows"  
Dag leans on her, gestures to the orange and cinnamon sky like a conductor, but Toast keeps looking at Slit. 

His legs stretched out and crossed in front of him, his powerful arms crossed over his chest, biceps bulging against a worn out t-shirt.  
He has his head leaning back against the wall as he listens to Nux going on about some car they're fixing up at the garage, and every time he catches her looking at him he grins at her slow and lazy, like a fucking Cheshire cat.


	2. The man who stole a river

The sisters get home and Miss Giddy has gotten Dag's baby Asa to sleep, washed all the dishes, finished writing another chapter of her 'alternative history' novel, and made a batch of wholewheat rolls that are cooling on the counter. 

She kisses them all on her way out the door, and Toast stands and watches the old woman's white hair shining through the darkness as she makes her way home, and thinks, not for the first time, that Miss Giddy is the only reason the sisters are not as mad as a sack of cats.  
.....

Miss Giddy is so old she has become ageless. A wrinkled, tattooed ex-wife who was supposed to indoctrinate the new wives into Joe’s ways, but only did that when he was watching.  
When he wasn't there she called Joe’s things rust stories, and instead she taught the sisters night stories, moon stories, blood stories, bone stories. Stories with wings that showed them the thousand different worlds beyond their prison.

Now she lives a few houses down from the sisters and looks after Asa a lot, and occasionally she goes off with Keep to 'writing retreats', which Toast is still kind of suspicious of. Because they usually come back with some lost soul that they've rescued from unfortunate circumstances. And both of them are grinning a little too evilly for old ladies that have spent all their time sitting in a guesthouse in the country drinking tea.  
.......

The sisters used to live locked up behind a solid steel door in Joe's vault.  
Now they live in an old wooden house near the river, in the kind of freedom they had never even allowed themselves to dream about.  
Their house is filled with vibrant colour and chaos. Dag has pet fish she feeds from the riverbank every morning. There are fireflies in the garden some nights. 

They’ve split up the chores so that Toast does finances and dish-washing, Dag does the garden and Capable does admin and cooking. Every Saturday morning they clean the house together and Nux usually comes over to help mow the lawn and fix random things that Toast suspects Dag breaks just so she can watch the goofy way Capable’s eyes cross over when she watches him work.

When Toast is washing dishes is the only time she really feels vaguely calm. There is something so satisfying about scalding dish water, mounds of bubbles, the simple, repetitive act of cleaning each dish and placing it wet and shiny in the rack. The fact that no matter how messy a plate is, with enough scrubbing you can always get it clean again.

The sister’s finances are pretty simple compared to Angelo’s.  
They don’t make that much, but they buy their staples in bulk and they each have different ways of making a little extra money on the side.

Dag grows rescued plants in recycled tins that she sells at the food garden’s café/craft shop. Capable babysits for a few of the foster parents who Furiosa has put her in touch with. 

Cape got Toast a job making audiobooks for a Library for the Blind project, but she was fired soon after due to her inability to stop commenting during reading: 

“How can this chick get pregnant if her boyfriend is a vampire, no sperm in Mr Dead, remember”

“That’s like the twentieth time she’s called it a quivering member… what the fuck is that…?”

Let’s just say she didn’t win the reader of the year award.

So now she works with Dag, recycling her tins for her, scraping off the labels and punching holes in the bottom of the cans so they can drain.  
Mindless and another task which she can lose herself in a little. And if she rescues/steals a few plants every now and then, who’s to know…

Furiosa lives a few houses down, close enough in case the sisters need her, close enough to help them feel a little more brave.  
She invites them over often for drinks or her legendary curries, which is how Toast knows that Max is slowly moving in with both of them trying really hard not to think about it. Each time there’s more of Max in Furiosa’s house. His toothbrush and razor in her en-suite bathroom, his running shoes drying on the porch, a growing stack of books on his side of the bed. There’s no way Furiosa reads Cormac McCarthy or Rilke, especially when the other side of the bed is piled with car manuals and various municipal tenders.

Nux and Slit live in an old block of flats near the garage. The top story on the side facing the park, so their living room looks right into a huge river gum, which is probably a good thing, because they don’t have curtains and they both like to walk around naked way too much.

No-one has enough furniture till Max and Furiosa pile them all into one of her bigger trucks one day and drive over to one of the westside suburbs where there are couches and tables and fridges and tvs and lawn chairs and a whole bunch of other things, just sitting outside on the pavement.

Toast leans down into the cab: “What the fuck?”

“Recycling day”, Max grins and Furiosa waves her metal hand to take in the whole street. “Happy shopping Toasty…”

And they drive around picking up pretty much all the basics they need to furnish their house. Once everything’s unloaded and roughly in the right place they leave the sisters to rearrange it how they want and rush off to do the same thing for the warboys.

Now everyone is pretty much set, and the sisters have every scheduled recycling day written in big green letters on their kitchen calendar. 

Each time the warboys borrow Fury’s truck and pick them up and they drive around like crazy people, buzzing on excitement, banging on the roof whenever they see something they like. And there’s something new each time. Asa's amazing mahogany crib, the Eeyore highchair, the lurid green couch that is so big they have to leave it on the porch, the hammock - which all of the sisters fall pretty deeply in love with and can’t imagine living without. Dag’s record player. Toast’s bookshelves. Capable’s four poster bed, which the boys dragged home and installed for her as a surprise. Slit’s set of weights, and his pimp-style sound system which Nux fixed up for him. 

And Nux’s beloved, truly hideous, giraffe-print lazy boy which he refuses to part with; which even Morsov agrees is probably the ugliest chair known to mankind. 

........................

The warboys who weren’t convicted have differing degrees of community service, hours and hours of angry muscle power for free.  
Most people are still scared of them but the Vuvalini hadn’t hesitated in snapping them up for their gardening projects and Furiosa puts the rest to work on the city’s various municipal work projects, fixing roads, cutting brush, cleaning up the rundown areas of town. 

That is until the trial goes into full swing and the milking mother’s come forward and insist on being part of the proceedings.  
......................

The state figures by now they’ve got a rough idea of how Joe set himself up like some kind of medieval warlord on his tucked away ranch:  
Shady military man who made himself an army funded by guns, drugs and human trafficking.  
Some people died, some women and kids got fucked around, and they really should sort out all those leftover smuggling ties with the soviet druglords....

So when the milking mothers arrive, the court is prepared to listen sympathetically, polite faces on.  
There’s a big box of tissues conveniently placed on the witness stand. 

Instead a small dark woman called Kirra comes forward and tells them how Joe stole a river. 

And Toast watches all those faces change as people try to get their heads around the fact that the main river running through their city hasn’t been drying up due to climate change as much as it has been squeezed down to a sluggish stream after Joe tapped into the county’s main aquifer and began selling off water to the highest bidder: pumping it off to various shady industries and fancy golf courses in towns nearby.  
When the mothers finish talking they file softly out of the room and there is no move to stop them. Even the lawyers sit stunned in their seats with the same ‘what the fuck’ face as everyone else.

 

Toast lies awake that night wishing Joe was still alive.  
So she could kill him again? So he could stand in a courtroom and account for his actions?  
Neither seem like enough punishment for a man who’s been killing the world that way. 

 

The trial is in complete shambles for a while afterwards. The state not sure who and how to prosecute for this.  
A contingent of big businessmen are insisting on their continuing water rights, and all the contractors are arguing that they have nothing to do with installing those underground pipelines up and down the county.

It looks like they might just get away with it until the Vuvalini send for Verona Hacking, once scrawny waif that Keep snuck out of a shady brothel, now an ass-kicking environmental lawyer who arrives at the courthouse in a camper-van.

Toast is skeptical at first. Verona’s long, black hair is in a loose plait that reaches her ass. She’s dressed in an Indian cotton wrap dress and leather sandals and she looks like she’s just got back from a few decades in Goa. But it only takes 35 minutes for Toast to love Verona for life when she reduces a golf course owner to a gibbering wreck. The next few weeks are probably the best part of the whole trial. There’s something strangely satisfying about seeing businessmen cry. 

So now Valkyrie has an army for her wetland rehabilitation project and she’s had the boys working harder than they ever did for Joe, dredging canals and rivers, breaking and building levees to get the river flowing back the way it used to before the mad men of the 40’s and 50’s built over it.  
Even Keep and Dag are growing river gums and coolibahs, swamp trees, sedges, rushes and reeds to be planted out in Valkyrie’s wake.

......

So the sisters are free, and Joe is dead, and there are so many amazing things in this new world.  
Like the internet! Toast cannot believe how incredible it is. She has a deep and passionate love affair with Wikipedia and Wikileaks until until her sisters start hiding all their computers and smartphones to force her to 'rejoin the human race'.  
And life is almost ok.

Except for the big, Angharad-shaped hole in the world. 

Toast keeps waiting for it to get better. No matter how good things are, there are still days when everything seems pointless without her.  
Toast feels guilty about each good thing she’s missing.

Max gives her a lift home one day.  
Parks and waits while she’s angrily gathering up books and shopping bags, then puts his hand on her arm as she’s about to get out the car, pulling her gently to face him: 

"You waiting for it to go away, yeah?  
It never goes away.  
You’ll have that scar forever..."  
Tightening his grip and looking deep into her eyes:  
"...but I promise you this…… just keep moving….. keep moving…. an after a while it doesn’t hurt as much." 

Toast goes up to her bed, and stays there for a week, refusing to leave.  
Finally Ms Giddy comes in with a beautifully sliced pear on a plate and a cup of tea.  
Lies down next to her and gathers her into her arms, smell of ink and vanilla and tea. 

"You gotta live for her, Sweetness. Eat this pear for her. Read books for her. Dance for her. Kiss people for her. You gonna carry her with you all the rest of your life.  
I don’t think she wants to spend it moping around with you in the dark..."

 

And one day Toast comes back from work to find Dag painting Angharad's portrait on the living room wall.  
She's crying as she paints, and she's describing Angharad to Asa, who is sat on a blanket watching her.  
"She had hair like this..... no, more flowy.....hands like this… and these scars - she did that herself you know..."

She looks lost and guilty and so, so young when she sees Toast standing there.  
"I’m worried I’m going to forget…"

And Toast is still for a long time, looking at the wall, and then she takes a paintbrush and starts painting Angharad’s words around her picture:  
"We are not things.... Our babies will not be warlords.."

And when Capable comes home she bursts into tears, clutches Asa on the couch for a long time, staring at Dag's painting. 

Finally gets up and writes ‘I could climb that man like a tree’.  
Which Angharad admitted once as she watched Brian Cox speaking about stars and the universe on Miss Giddy's secret television set.


	3. Movie Night

Asa is the only kid that Toast has ever liked and she’s pretty sure it’s gonna stay that way.

Dag had been pretty undecided when she was pregnant, was haunted by the idea of a boy growing up to be just like Joe.  
Old dead Joe playing a final trick on them from the grave: maybe he really was immortal.  
There was no way Dag wanted to raise the dreaded spawn that would lead to his resurrection. 

She stayed angry and indecisive until Keep suggested that the baby might be a girl. And then Dag did a whole lot of weird praying stuff that seemed to involve lying on the grass at night staring up at the moon. 

The birth itself is pretty epic. Dag’s waters break just after lunch and she gets up and walks around the garden chanting like she’s calling up all the forces of the earth to be with her.  
By midnight Toast is trying not to faint into the birthing pool, the Vuvalini are gathered round the candlelit room like witches and Dag is screaming like a banshee with Capable and Cheedo on either side of her. 

It takes till sunrise and Toast almost passes out when she first sees Keep bringing the baby up out of the water, out of Dag. It’s covered in blood and creamy vernix and it looks like some alien creature, red and wrinkled, dark hair plastered to its scalp.  
Keep places it against Dag’s chest and she holds it there, tears streaming down her face, gazing into her child’s eyes like they hold all the answers in the universe. 

And only when she moves to count fingers and toes does she see.  
“Oh Fuck…”

It’s a boy. 

“Well you can’t put it back now Girlie!”  
Which sets the whole room laughing and crying at the same time. 

.........

It takes them all a few months to get used to Asa. To understand what he wants from the different kinds of sounds he makes.  
Dag is still pretty upset that he’s not a girl, and also not really wanting to bond with him because she keeps feeling like he’ll be taken away.  
It takes the Vuvalini a good while to convince her that Joe is dead, dead, dead, and that anyone who would take Asa is behind bars and staying there. 

And after a while her fizziness just seems to simmer down, and then the sisters have never seen her so calm. 

Now she hands her baby over to the sisters or to Nux or Slit like she just knows they’ll keep him safe.  
And because of that, they have to. 

Toast comes home one evening to find Asa curled up like a frog on Nux’s bare chest. Nux is still in his work jeans, looking exhausted, and Cape is nestled into his side, reading out loud until they all fall asleep.  
Dag is on the couch outside, sewing some of her old clothes into a huge patchwork blanket.  
Toast makes them hot chocolate and brings it out to sit with her.  
She sips and then grins at Toast’s unasked question. 

“Skin to skin contact is really important for babies. It soothes them....  
He’s learning bout his tribe”. 

"Nux is part of his tribe? Slit?"

"They’d kill anyone who hurt that child. You know that right?"

Toast grumbles, unconvinced. 

Until one of the days when they’re all helping out at the food garden. A day so hot they stop at midday and lie around in the shade, waiting for it to cool down a little before they can carry on. 

And she comes across Slit holding Asa on his lap while Dag sleeps beneath a tree nearby.  
He’s singing a very bawdy drinking song in a low, rough croon, and Asa’s holding onto his fingers and looking at him like he’s one of his most favourite people in the world.  
Slit’s a bit sheepish when he sees her there. Stops singing and scowls as if he's irritated at being stuck holding the baby.

“He woke up, didn’t want him to wake his Ma…  
She’ll make us start working again.” 

But Toast knows it isn’t that at all. 

.........

Every few weeks Dag gets Miss Giddy to babysit, they pick up Cheedo and head to discount movie night at the oldest cinema in town.  
It doesn’t really matter what they watch: art movies, old classics, kung fu marathons...  
The sisters load themselves up with food and drinks and disappear from the world together.  
It’s just one of the many things that Dag has named ‘going down the rabbit hole’, which means trying to get some vague understanding of a thing they missed out on while they were locked away.  
It’s become the way the sisters code the world into things they understand and things they’re still trying to.  
Anything they don’t get is ‘rabbit things’. Like most of the movies set in high schools, or the vampire and werewolf ones, or the big debate between Star Wars and Star Trek – neither of which they’ve seen. 

What they do learn is that Cheedo and Dag love anything animated, Capable loves dramas – especially the historical ones, and, of course: romantic comedies.  
And Toast feels too guilty to tell her sisters that she hates pretty much everything except the gory ones. Spaghetti westerns, martial arts films, epic revenge flicks, anything with a killer soundtrack and some action.  
She doesn’t have the patience for pretty things, for cuteness, for beautiful scenery, for intricate dialogue, for slow builds of sweeping emotion, for layers of human drama.  
She wants epic sword fights, car chases, smart-ass wisecracks from the hero: even when they’re being tortured, slow motion sprays of blood, the chink of teeth being spat onto the floor. 

Every time the evil bad guy is killed in the end it brings a smile to her face, because it feels, for a few short moments, like there’s maybe some justice in the world. 

After a while Capable asks if Nux can come, and he soon becomes their designated driver, and then he starts bringing Slit, and they all have to squish up on each other’s laps in the car. 

And Toast finds that as annoying as he is, having Slit at movie night does have its advantages. Because she can leave the sisters and Nux, (how hilarious is it to watch Nux pretending he wants to see whatever he thinks Cape would want to see?), to whatever trite crap they want to watch, and her and Slit can go and soak up the gore. 

Even if is a little disturbing to sit next to Slit in a movie theatre. He glares at anyone who asks them to move down the row, delights in slurping soda as loud as he can, and doesn’t give a shit about talking during the movie, usually to the characters on screen, as if he knows and despises them all. 

“Get up dickwad, he’s gonna kick you again! You rotting, shitting smeg… get up!”  
While Toast tries to disappear into her chair. 

He usually eats all of Toast’s popcorn but after a while he starts to make up for it by sneaking in licorice string and sour jellybeans and a hipflask of whiskey - which makes Toast willing to forgive quite a lot of sins. 

There’s something soothing about his hulking, noisy presence. And something that she can’t quite name that happens to her insides when he laughs low and wicked next to her in the dark.

**Author's Note:**

> One of the greatest things to me about the writing in Fury Road is that the wives' story does not focus on their abuse, which many other film writers would have gone into gory detail, exoticising their victimhood and their need to be rescued.
> 
> Instead, the wives' story begins with their escape; we don't even see them in the vault.  
> The film unfolds to show us how they each grow along the Fury Road, and how they deal with turning around and going right back to deal with - and overcome - the shit that is Joe and his regime.  
> For the wives and Furiosa - the only way out is through.
> 
> Similarly, in this story I am avoiding going into great detail about their abuse under cult leader Joe, either in the past, or during any of the therapy sessions. Also for the reason that such things may possibly be triggering and I'd like to avoid that if possible. 
> 
> I'd rather focus on the different ways the sisters make sense of the world after their escape, and the ways that they come to realise, even cynical Toast, that the human spirit is an incredibly resilient thing, that it is possible to change, and that when it comes to things like love and relationships, sometimes it's best to let go of all your preconceptions and see where the road takes you.
> 
> So while there is mention of group therapy practices, I'mma keep more along the lines of different practices the Vuvalini discuss to reclaim and celebrate their bodies, their freedom and the right to tell their own stories.  
> Not all of which Toast appreciates;)


End file.
